y of the divine works and the dignity of the divine Worker,
we shall be freshly led to the same conclusion. Has God moulded
the dead clay of the material universe into gleaming globes and
ordered them to fly through the halls of space forever, and has he
created, out of his own omnipotence, mental personalities
reflecting his own attributes, and doomed them to go out in
endless night after basking, poor ephemera, in the sunshine of a
momentary life? It is not to be imagined that God ever works in
vain. Yet if a single consciousness be extinguished in everlasting
nonentity, so far as the production of that consciousness is
concerned he has wrought for nothing. His action was in vain,
because all is now, to that being, exactly the same as if it had
never been. God does nothing in sport or unmeaningly: least of all
would he create filial spirits, dignified with the solemn
endowments of humanity, without a high and serious end.14 To make
men, gifted with such a transcendent largess of powers, wholly
mortal, to rot forever in the grave after life's swift day, were
work far more unworthy of God than the task was to Michael Angelo
set him in mockery by Pietro, the tyrant who succeeded Lorenzo the
Magnificent in the dukedom of Florence, that he should scoop up
the snow in the Via Larga, and with his highest art mould a statue
from it, to dissolve ere night in the glow of the Italian sun.

Thirdly, it is an attribute of Infinite Wisdom to proportion
powers to results, to adapt instruments to ends with exact
fitness. But if we are utterly to die with the ceasing breath,
then there is an amazing want of symmetry between our endowments
and our opportunity; our attainments are most superfluously
superior to our destiny. Can it be that an earth house of six feet
is to imprison forever the intellect of a La Place, whose
telescopic eye, piercing the unfenced fields of immensity,
systematized more worlds than there are grains of dust in this
globe? the heart of a Borromeo, whose seraphic love expanded to
the limits of sympathetic being? the soul of a Wycliffe, whose
undaunted will, in faithful consecration to duty, faced the fires
of martyrdom and never blenched? the genius of a Shakspeare, whose
imagination exhausted worlds and then invented new? There is vast
incongruity between our faculties and the scope given them here.
On all it sees below the soul reads "Inadequate," and rises

13 Aebli, Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele,